The Accidental Poetry of Google's Predictive Search

A new Reddit thread showcases some of the inadvertently piquant poetry that happens, thanks to Google’s auto-finish.

Half the fun of finding what you’re looking for online is finding what you’re not looking for.

Most of the time, a happy search accident means falling into a binary code-borne wormhole of info unexpectedly. Every now and then, though, you only need get midway through the act of searching to get there. The predictive sentence-finishing capacity in Google’s browser shows you similar items other people have searched for, and now it turns out these items take on sobering new meaning when removed from context.

A new thread called Google Poems opened up on Reddit recently, showing off the accidental poetry of four different variations on a theme. There is just something so very Zen about the collision of different twists on the same subject, and the repetitive format evokes the staccato rhythms of poetry—particularly of the beat variety.

Have a look at some of our favorite offerings in the slide show above.